Today our country is living in a moment of profound cultural change regarding the respect that every person must have for women’s rights: rights as important as their life, physical, psychic integrity and personal freedom.
That is why, motivated mainly by the series of cases of violence against women that in recent years have been public knowledge and that “produce a great shock and concern in the population”, Ms. RN Erika Olivera sent a draft resolution, requesting the President of the Republic to instruct the Ministry of Education to “formulation and/or adequacy of the contents of the national educational curriculum in order to incorporate the perspective of gender equity and prevention of gender-based violence at all educational levels”.
Constituent facts of gender-based violence, such as femicides and domestic violence, are of constant occurrence in our country. “Today that we presented this draft resolution, two frustrated femicides took place in Santiago. Both aggressors tried to burn their partners, in San Bernardo, a man tried to set fire to his partner by throwing flames with a spray, while in Santiago Centro another guy sprayed his partner with thinner,” he explains in the project.
In this regard, the Member states that the facts described above raise fundamental questions: to whom are we educating? What values are we giving, what example have we been to others, so that we may have these inhuman beings among us, capable of committing unthinkable aberrations? “These are obvious questions to ask, because violence against women and cases of femicide, far from diminishing over the years, have increased in our country and across the globe, worryingly.”
In Chile, the Center for Statistical Studies over the past year recorded nearly 93,000 reports of domestic violence where the victim was a woman, just over 6,000 cases from 2018. In addition, according to a report by the Ecpal, 3529 women died in Latin America on gender grounds in 2018.
Meanwhile, in Chile the figure exceeded 400 victims in the last decade and in many of these cases there was a history of domestic violence. Of 46 femicides that occurred in 2019 in our country, 20 had a history of domestic violence reported. Eleven of these cases had a precautionary measure of estrangement that was simply not appropriated by the femicide.
Gender-based violence is, today, “a structural problem of our society that must be addressed, not only from the punitive technique of punishment of the aggressor, but also from prevention, especially in the education and training of the children and adolescents of our country”.
“The background cultural change that our society needs must be forged from the houses, from the teaching that parents give to their sons and daughters, as well as in the classrooms of schools and high schools, first social spaces where children share activities and relate. We must aspire as a society to the ideal that respectful relationships between men and women that are generated since early childhood are fully replicated when men and women begin to relate affectionately,” he concludes.
